Bert Stern's one-off movie about the 1958 Newport jazz festival is a classic piece of multimedia, where sensitive, intimate cinematography of the performers is intercut with gorgeous images: boats, water and sea birds; the fashionably dressed audience; sweat-drenched rehearsals. The DVD version incorporates an interview with Stern, biographies of featured artists (including Thelonious Monk, Anita O'Day, Jimmy Giuffre and Louis Armstrong) and a documentary about the making of the film. Also included is a complete CD of the music, with clips of interview and rehearsal sound. Admittedly, as an audio CD it is hardly a five-star disc, but the whole package is an audiovisual treat, a moment to savour from the Indian summer of jazz, rock'n'roll rumbling in the distance (Jo Jones drums cheerfully behind Chuck Berry for Sweet Little Sixteen) and free jazz barely a premonition (Eric Dolphy plays flute on Chico Hamilton's moody Blue Sands).

Mike Stern Voices (Division One/Atlantic) *** £13.99

Richard Bona Reverence (Columbia) *** £13.99

At first, Voices sounds more like a Richard Bona album, with great vocals and rhythms and hardly a guitar solo in earshot - not at all the sort of thing you might expect from a well established fusion guitar hero like Mike Stern, whom many have dismissed as one of Miles Davis's least interesting sidemen. The sunny voice on the first couple of tracks is indeed Bona, the awesomely talented Cameroonian. And there's Stern, playing immaculately modest guitar in a superb back-line with Vinnie Colaiuta on drums, producer Jim Beard on keyboards and percussionist Arto Tuncboyaciyan. Nearly all the tracks employ vocals, and bassists Chris Minh Doky and Lincoln Goines also put in an appearance, not to mention Steely Dan guitarist Jon Herington. The super-fast Way Out East features Michael Brecker on tenor. We get a slight return to guitar-freak heroism by track three (Slow Change), but Beard and Stern have cleverly integrated the needs of jazz headbangers with a wider sense of pace, melody and taste.

Bona's self-produced album has many of the same elements. As a showcase for his many talents, as writer, bassist, guitarist and golden-voiced frontman, perhaps this is the demo that will secure him the services of a really good producer. The reliable Colaiuta plays drums, but the overall effect is a little soft-centred. Compiled together, the best tracks from Reverence and Voices would make a cracking album.

Miles Davis Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It's About That Time (Columbia) *** £16.99

The recording is distorted and uncomfortable; the performances intense and "difficult". Yet as a historical document of a time when the great trumpeter's music was changing fast, this album makes a fascinating footnote to the famous studio albums In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. The band featured the great team of Jack DeJohnette on drums, Dave Holland on bass, Chick Corea on electric piano and Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira, plus saxophonist Wayne Shorter (who was shortly to launch Weather Report with Joe Zawinul).

Spike Milligan once said Miles played as if someone were standing on his foot; Kenneth Tynan's daughter said he sounded like a little boy who had been locked out. There's evidence for both views on this double CD. And there's a comic poignancy in the information that the hippie listeners of the Fillmore East were actually waiting for Neil Young and Steve Miller.

Various Artists Roots of Afro-Cuban Jazz/ Afro-Cuban Jazz Now **** £8.99 each

Gonzalo Rubalcaba Trio Supernova (all on Blue Note) ** £12.99

Both of the Afro-Cuban CDs here were compiled by producer Michael Cuscuna. The "Roots" album opens with the Stan Kenton big band's version of Pete Rugolo's Machito, followed by Dizzy Gillespie's breathtaking 1947 live recording of George Russell's Cubano Be, Cubano Bop, featuring Chano Pozo. The great, short-lived conga player turns up again on Tadd Dameron's Jahbero and on a couple of late 1940s tracks by tenor player James Moody, including Tin Tin Deo, complete with a vocal by Pozo. In the 1950s tracks, such as Kenny Dorham's Afrodisia, it is fascinating to hear how well jazz drummers such as Art Blakey worked alongside Cuban percussionists such as Carlos "Patato" Valdez, not to mention the bop soloists' ease in blowing across the Afro-Cuban feels.

The "Now" CD is full of tracks as dazzling - brilliantly played and crisply recorded, as you might expect - but there are few real classics. Chucho Valdes's band tears into the standard Caravan with a speed and facility that recalls the worst excesses of 1970s fusion. The musicians are to be admired for throwing off some of shackles of the genre's past, but too many pieces go nowhere fast.

Gonzalo Rubalcaba is a talented pianist and composer who apparently has the technique and energy needed to make something genuinely new in Afro-Cuban jazz. Yet this self-produced album is decidedly lacklustre, overladen with fussy detail and lacking in heart. Where Medeski Martin and Wood take vernacular rhythms as springboards for invention, Rubalcaba's crew seem to be trapped by the very claves that once gave new freedom to jazz.

Zuco 103 The Other Side of Outro Lado (Ziriguiboom) ** £14.99

The Belgian Ziriguiboom label has acquired a reputation for fusing the warmth of Brazilian songwriting with the cool, obsessive detail of European electronic music production. Zuco 103, whose debut album Outro Lado (The Other Side) came out in 1999, are a Amsterdam-based trio featuring Brazilian singer and co-writer Lillian Vieira.

The Other Side of Outro Lado is remixed and remodelled from the earlier album. Bossacucanova make an appearance, as do the New Cool Collective, and the title track is given four different treatments, including a subtle and funky Presence Mix by Charles Webster. Remixes by United Groove Collective and DJ Git Hyper touch the bases of repetitive boredom you could only bear in a club with very attractive distractions. Not to be outdone in the tedium stakes, Webster returns with a Presence dub of Outro Lado that undoes much of the good he did earlier. The Dave and Bast mix by David Walters and S Apert manages to do something new while staying within the narrow brief of club remixing, while the fourth version is a live cut featuring Airto Moreira, the Medicamento batacuda group and the Children's Choir of the Amsterdam Music School. It's all quite nice, but however hip the context, or heavy their friends, Zuco 103 have still to prove they're more than just another Latin band from the lowlands.